Mysterious Skin

by Scott Heim

  Neil made a hip-swaying motion, his way of scratching without using his hands. He positioned his bag on the X-ray conveyor and stepped through the security sensor. I would have bet a month’s worth of allowance on it beeping. It didn’t. “Hooray,” said his mom.

  On the other side of an enormous plate glass rectangle, the 747 waited, scheduled to board in mere minutes. There was no sense in staying to watch. Neil raised a hand to us, and we turned away.

  I figured if I were a true death rocker—if I honestly believed in my black clothes and dyed hair, in my fascination with skulls and crosses and dilapidated cemeteries, or in the melancholy and nihilistic lyrics that littered my favorite bands’ songs—then this would be the point I’d hang myself. My parents were ten feet under. Neil might as well have been with them. I picked up my journal, scribbled a stick figure distended from a noose, and debated for ten minutes on a proper metaphor for what would lie ahead. I finally settled on “my future is a booby prize.”

  Two weeks to the day after Neil left, I vowed to stop moping in my room. The poems I’d been writing were nothing but whiny diatribes I’d surely blush at later. “Time for a change,” I said. I waited for my grandparents to catch the senior center bus for their afternoon of bingo. Then I rummaged through some junk in the garage until I came up with the dog grooming kit they’d used years ago on their now-deceased poodle. I clicked the attachment I needed onto the clippers and took a deep breath. In the bathroom mirror, the hair fluttered off in fuzzy black clumps to reveal the shabby blond beneath. “Ouch.” I looked as though I’d just escaped from a death camp. I’d dye it again later.

  I drove around Hutchinson, windows down, relishing the slight breeze against my shorn head. I passed the fairgrounds, where carnies and commissioned KSIR prisoners mowed, cleaned, and set up rides and ticket booths for the imminent Kansas State Fair. It would be my first, but Neil would miss it. Across the street was the discount bakery where he and I had shoplifted fruit pies. In one window, left over from the recent holidays, were stale cakes lettered with HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, FOR A FANTASTIC FATHER, etcetera.

  At a traffic light, two heavy-metallers looked over from their car. “Skinhead,” one of them barked. The word was so different from faggot or freak. I could get used to it.

  I drove to North Monroe, anticipating Neil’s mom’s reaction to my hair, hopeful she would accompany me to thrift stores. A car sat in the ditch, a Toyota, the sun’s glare ricocheting off its windshield. But the Impala was nowhere to be seen. I figured Mrs. McCormick was at work. I rang the doorbell anyway; heard the spooky echo from inside, like a child’s voice calling across an empty canyon. I doubted she’d locked the door, but I didn’t try opening it.

  “You’re probably having the time of your life,” I said aloud to the nonexistent Neil. And then, telepathically: Come back.

  There was no way I could steal from the United Methodist Thrift without Neil. I couldn’t do a lot of things without him. I walked back to the car, and as I did I noticed someone watching me. A figure lounged in the Toyota’s driver’s seat, a blond kid whose eyes approached a bugging-out-of-his-head wideness. I recalled the stories Neil had told about his neighbors: how they were morons, how they had eavesdropped and spied on him and his mom since the day they’d moved in.

  I started the car. In the mirror, I saw him getting out, stepping toward me. For a millisecond I panicked, half-remembering a story about a young drifter-murderer who crept up on victims in their cars, unsheathing his foot-long butcher knife, ripping it across their throats before they had the chance to scream…. No, this kid looked as harmless as a baby beagle.

  He stood beside the Gremlin, contemplating me. His stare was benign, not the kind I was used to from strangers. Sweat stained his too-tight shirt, his glasses disorganized his face, and the zit above his lip looked ready to burst. Still, something about him was cute. “Are you N. McCormick?” he asked.

  “N.?” I almost laughed. “Neil?” Then I did laugh. “No. I’m certainly not Neil McCormick. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “So it’s Neil,” he said, then said the name again. He seemed briefly excited; in seconds, that excitement fizzled, altered, became something close to disappointment. “Doesn’t live here. I’ve visited nearly all the McCormicks listed in the phone book, trying to find him. It’s taken all week. I’ve spent too much money on gas.”

  That sounded illicit. I leaned out the car window, inspecting him head-to-toe. “Who are you, the FBI?”

  “I used to know Neil,” he said. “At least, I think I did. But weird things happened to us, he and I together, and I need him now. To help me remember.” He blinked twice nervously, a gesture that made him seem close to tears. He was holding something, twisting and twirling it in his fingers. It was an unsightly ball of red and black hair, and it resembled a chunky mouse. He pocketed it. “Do you have any clue how I could get in touch with him?”

  “Yes,” I said. If he was interested, I could tell him a lot. And perhaps he could tell me something about Neil, could answer some of the million questions that had sprouted in my head during the past few months. I held out my hand. “I’m a friend of Neil’s. Eric Preston.”

  He shook it. “Brian Lackey,” he said.

  We looked away, toward the McCormick house. Neither of us spoke for what seemed a very long time.

  part three

  WHITE

  Autumn-Winter 1991

  thirteen

  BRIAN LACKEY

  Amazing things were happening. Summer fizzled, depositing its remains in swirling piles of leaves, sap that trickled from trees, and skeletal tumbleweeds that bounced through our town’s streets. The air smelled of ripening squash and melon. The nights became longer and cooler. I spent them lazing on my bed, my gaze directed out the window, watching migrating birds that scattered the sky. A family of possums took up residence in the trees beside our house. The cicadas buzzed their autumn lullabies; in the mornings, as I mowed my designated lawns for the final times that year, I’d find their crispy yellow shells fastened to trees, signposts, the frames of Little River’s decks and porches.

  Gradually, my alien dreams ceased. Other dreams replaced them, these more brief and unsophisticated, new crystal-clear scenarios into which the eight-year-old Neil McCormick sometimes figured. I abandoned my dream log beneath my bed.

  A certain sentence rang through my sleep, one spoken by Neil McCormick, seven words that I first remembered on the night Avalyn had been inside my room. Open your eyes, it will feel good.

  College began in September. I enrolled, bought books, and studied. My mother surprised me by pulling into the driveway in a used Mustang she’d bargained from a lot in Hutchinson. The Toyota became my hand-me-down. I drove to school in the mornings and returned in the evenings, the routine falling into place.

  Things went as expected; my courses, however, were easier than I’d predicted. And my psychology, calculus, meteorology, and English classes interested me less than did my growing friendship with Eric Preston. Since I’d met him, we’d been spending the steamy afternoons by frequenting the dollar-fifty matinees at the Flag Theater or listening to tapes in his room. I fibbed to my mother and claimed he was a friend from school I studied with. Initially I’d thought him strange, insisting we had nothing in common. But I realized that was wrong—I was no doubt just as strange. Besides, had I ever had a real friend before? Avalyn, perhaps, but she was thirteen years my senior. And as the days pitched forward, as my uncertainty about the UFOs and aliens grew, I wanted to divorce myself from my obsession with Avalyn. Although still preoccupied with the need to discover the solution to my missing time, I was no longer so certain the answer emanated from the spaceship I’d seen hovering over my house. The only thing I now knew was that somehow, Neil McCormick had my answer. And Eric Preston would lead me to him.

  One night, not long after we’d met, Eric and I sat in his room and told each other about our lives. He outlined his childhood in Modesto, California, descri
bing what he called “a completely normal life” until he started high school—when, he said, he “hung out with a wild crowd,” began “committing little crimes and taking cheap drugs,” and “came to the conclusion” he was gay. “A queer. A full-fledged fag.” He watched me when he said that, waiting for my reaction.

  “Doesn’t bother me,” I said.

  Eric continued. “Ultimately, I was knocked senseless by my parents’ car accident.” At that point, his face thawed slightly. “So here I am, in Kansas, with my dead dad’s parents.” His eyes closed and opened in slow motion. “Reborn.”

  My turn. My childhood seemed tame when compared to his. I hadn’t taken drugs, hadn’t committed crimes, and was about as versed in sex as I was in sign language or acupuncture. So I made things brief, supplying little details: as a kid, I loved to capture grasshoppers and dragonflies in mayonnaise jars. Once my sister, Deborah, her friend Breeze, and I had tromped through an overgrown field to search for sandhill plums, only to be plagued with poison ivy the following day. My father never really liked me. In high school, I’d snagged second prize in a state-wide math contest….

  Ultimately I cast anchor on what I knew Eric wanted to hear: why I’d chosen to seek out Neil McCormick. I chronicled the central mystery of my life, my obsession. I explained why I thought something important, even profound, remained hidden in the empty cracks from my eight-year-old summer; that Halloween two years later. And I ended by telling him about my interest in Avalyn. I hesitated; although no longer certain the UFO belief was truth, at least I considered that story intriguing or out of the ordinary. So I told Eric about the slight possibility that Neil and I were the victims of an abduction.

  Eric appeared amazed, but I felt relieved when he didn’t laugh. He professed to be interested in unexplained phenomena as well, especially parapsychology. “I’m telepathic,” he told me. “Well, slightly.” He could prove it by a test: I would concentrate and close my eyes; he would transmit a message, just by staring at my head. I did as he instructed, but didn’t hear any inner voice. “What message did you receive?” Eric asked.

  I ventured a guess. “Urn, the weather sure is nice today?”

  He winced. “Oh, forget it.”

  Outside, cars drag raced through the trailer court’s cul-de-sac. When the noise quieted, Eric asked further questions about the aliens. I mentioned the dreams I’d had; my recent inklings that something more lurked beneath them. When I finished, Eric promised to prepare Neil for our upcoming meeting by informing him about my UFO suspicions. “No, you don’t have to do that,” I said.

  “Yes I do. I’ll send him a letter.”

  “Hmm.” I imagined Neil McCormick’s fingers tearing at Eric’s envelope, the same fingers I’d dreamed gripping mine. I saw him reading, pausing over the words about me, and then, as he gradually remembered, closing his eyes and smiling.

  One morning, the telephone woke me, and minutes later my mother appeared in my bedroom doorway. “It’s Avalyn,” she said. I hadn’t seen Avalyn since that night on my bed, the night of her failed attempt at whatever she was attempting. I’d only spoken to her twice that month. In many ways, I missed her. But an inner voice held me back, instructing to put my Avalyn visits on hiatus until I discovered more about Neil and our past together. “Tell her I’m asleep,” I said.

  My mother grabbed the upstairs extension. “I’m afraid he’s still in bed. All that studying makes him sleepy.” Something—possibly triumph—soured her voice. “Bye-bye.”

  Just as I began dozing off, the phone rang again. I knew it wouldn’t be Avalyn, so I answered. It was Eric, asking if I wanted to “go hunt watermelons.” That sounded odd. I hadn’t eaten watermelon in years, due to the simple fact that they had overpopulated my childhood. After my father had left, the field beside our house had become just that: a field. It was no longer a venerated patch of land for growing that sticky-sweet fruit; no longer a place where my father spent summer and autumn hours planting, cultivating, and ultimately picking.

  Still, when Eric asked, it piqued my interest. I brushed aside papers scribbled with notes for my upcoming psychology exam. “They won’t be ripe anymore,” I guaranteed. “It’s nearly November.” Then he told me we would go along as guests of Ellen McCormick. Neil’s mother. The person closest to him, the woman I still hadn’t met. “What time should I be there?” I asked.

  Now that I had unlimited use of the Toyota, I could come and go as I pleased. I hedged telling my mother the truth, tapping a knuckle on my psychology book to indicate I planned to study at the library. My mother seemed to like Eric slightly more than she had Avalyn; nevertheless, the day after she met him, she’d referred to him as “weird” and “morose,” claiming she believed he “carried some secret in all that depression.” I didn’t care what she thought; he was my friend. I stepped out the door, waving good-bye.

  It was jacket-wearing weather, and the road from Little River to Hutchinson had changed color, everything now a dull, deerskin brown. When I pulled into the trailer court and knocked on the door, Eric’s grandma answered. She and her husband gave me the same polite “hello” and “how are you” I’d grown accustomed to. Eric emerged from the hallway, dressed in black, fiddling with a limp, spotted banana peel. “Hey, man,” he said. I followed him to his cramped bedroom, selected a tape by a band I’d never heard, and popped it into the stereo.

  “We’re meeting Neil’s mom in an hour,” Eric told me. “Don’t be shocked, but I think we’ll be trespassing through someone’s pasture. Neil’s mom found some field on the west side of town, and it’s full of melons and pumpkins. She wants to make watermelon-rind pickles. She hopes the owners don’t mind if she borrows some melons.”

  Eric’s grandpa knocked and entered with a plate of brownies. I sat on the opposite end of Eric’s futon, positioned the brownies between us, then asked, “Why’d she invite me? She doesn’t even know me.”

  “Actually, it was my idea to invite you. When she called, I suggested it. She and I became friends, sort of, when Neil was still around. Strange, I guess.” Eric licked the corner of a brownie, testing it, then took a bite. Clumps of hair poked in awkward, three-quarter-inch angles from his head, uncombed from last night’s sleep, his haircut identical to a band member’s on the poster behind him. “Honesty time. I sort of fell in love with Neil. Wasn’t reciprocated, though. Hope that doesn’t freak you out. Anyway, I think Neil’s mom knows that. Could be she feels sorry for me. Could be she’s like us, she doesn’t really have anyone to hang out with. Especially now, with Neil in New York.”

  So that was it, I thought. Eric had fallen in love with Neil. “Is Neil—” I couldn’t think of how to finish.

  “Yes, he’s a queer,” Eric said. That sounded too harsh, a word I remembered hearing my father say, a scowl engraved into his face, whenever he described the women players on certain softball teams he drove into Hutchinson to watch. It dawned on me that my father, back when he lived with us, had always frequented tournaments at Sun Center, the same softball complex where, according to Eric, Neil had been employed as a scorekeeper.

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Before we meet Mrs. McCormick, I’d love it if you could take me to Sun Center. To see where Neil worked.”

  Eric grinned, revealing something almost mean in the angle of his mouth. “Gotcha. I’ll show you Sun Center. And then I’ll show you where he really worked.”

  We left the bedroom. Eric handed the plate back to his grandpa. “These were scrumptious.” He didn’t bother informing his grandparents where we were going.

  Sun Center had closed, the summer’s tournaments finished. Eric stopped the car at the padlocked gate. Ahead of us, a sign read KANSAS’S LARGEST HAVEN FOR SOFTBALL FUN. He clucked his tongue at it. “Sorry. Looks like we can’t get in.” I surveyed the place. The only signs of life were some sparrows, a hunchbacked groundskeeper sprinklering brown plants, and two children who’d somehow managed to climb the fence and now seesawed in the complex’s playground.


  “See those press boxes above the bleachers?” I looked to where his finger pointed. “That’s where Neil sat, hour after hour, blabbing on and on about this and that nonsense. You know, ‘Preston the batter, Lackey on deck.’ That sort of stuff.” I tried to imagine Neil sitting there, his face behind the glass, watching every move the players made. All I could envision was the boy’s face in the Little League photo. I saw Avalyn smashing that picture against her knee; next, the prepubescent Avalyn from “World of Mystery,’ her pigtails shooting behind her.

  “We had sex up there once,” Eric said. He paused and looked at me, the expression on his face now flushed and dithery, his eyes gone glassy. “Oh, sorry. I’m not trying to shock you. That stuff’s over with anyway.” He backed away from the gate and stomped the accelerator. Dust and dead leaves spun behind the car in a brown cyclone. The kids on the seesaw watched us leave, shaking their middle fingers.

  Eric checked the dashboard clock. “This thing’s fifteen minutes slow,” he said, “so we should be meeting Neil’s mom in about ten minutes. Enough time to show you Carey Park.”

  We drove east, then south. My parents had taken me to Carey Park once or twice, years back. I remembered playgrounds, softball diamonds, a golf course, a fishing pond, and a minizoo where ostriches, gazelles, and a dusty-bearded buffalo lazed under cottonwood trees. “The animals aren’t there anymore,” Eric said. “Losers from high school were poisoning them, so the city called it quits on the zoo.”

  The road twirled through the park. A ubiquitous, decaying odor pervaded the air, a smell like sun-poached fish on a riverbank. Leaves fell on the windshield, and the sky smeared with barn swallows and sparrows. On the right, more kids were swinging and seesawing. On the left, two men in white pants carried their clubs toward a dirt mound. This golf course needs mowing, I thought.